E.X.P.E.R.I.E.N.C.E.

What is human experience? Has it become a competition of who can see, feel, and be more? What, then, qualifies as experience? What are we trying to attain by the end of our mayfly lives?

Do we regard travel as experience? Is there a list of landmarks in order of most important to most beautiful?

Is it pain? Is it difficulty? Is it the ability to say ‘gosh that sounds hard, but I have it harder!’?

Color, light, petals, spices, crackling laughter… dark, dust, tragedy, broken glass, broken hearts. What of these two opposite sides of a spectrum cultivates our souls and comes together in a jar of airborne telegram letters which together spell E.X.P.E.R.I.E.N.C.E.?

Learning. It is learning. Experience exists both in our mistakes and double takes. It dwells in the corners of the world and the blood-splattered walls. It passes time bathing in the light of distant lands and in the bitterness of someone else’s breakfast. We are curious,and the feast of curiosity is learning. The best meals count as experience.

We are passengers seated between shoulder blades, walking the beast we call Earth like it is still, as it too shoots through dark space on a long unending journey.We gaze at the stars and trace them into the lines of our hands, comparing the wisdom we pretend they share.

If our lives must be storybooks, we have to keep it interesting, so that we, the reader, don’t get too bored. Our story must be worth its usually abrupt ending, satisfied by its ups and downs, content with the paper-cuts it leaves.